NJ Senate Passes Gay Marriage as Christie Threatens Veto

The New Jersey Senate passed a bill that would allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, in the face of Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s promise to veto it.

The Senate voted 24-16 in favor of the measure, sending it to the Assembly, which plans to consider it Feb. 16. Democrats, who control both houses of the Legislature, have made gay marriage a priority for 2012, two years after they failed to pass a similar bill supported by then-Gov. Jon Corzine.

Christie, 49, opposes same-sex marriage and wants voters to decide the issue in a referendum. New Jersey is among at least six U.S. states dealing with the issue this year. Washington’s Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire plans to sign a measure today allowing gay couples to wed. Lawmakers in Maryland and Illinois are debating the unions as North Carolina and Minnesota have proposed initiatives to ban them.

“When marriage equality was enacted in New York and more recently in Washington state, it could not have done so without the support of courageous Republicans who bucked their party because they knew they had to do the right thing,” Senate President Stephen Sweeney said during debate. “I know many of you deep down know this is absolutely the right thing to do.”

Almost 55 percent of New Jersey voters support gay marriage and 35 percent don’t, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll released today. When lawmakers weighed the issue in 2009, 46 percent were in favor and 40 percent weren’t.

Voters nationwide have rejected same-sex marriage in all 31 referendums on the issue. Democrats in New Jersey say the right of gay couples to marry is a civil freedom that shouldn’t be subject to a popular vote.

Corzine, a one-term Democrat, signed a measure in 2006 to allow civil unions after the state Supreme Court ordered lawmakers to extend marital rights to gay couples. The law is being challenged in state court by Lambda Legal, a national gay- rights advocacy group, which argues that it doesn’t provide the same benefits and protections as marriage.

New Jersey’s civil-unions law is “government sanctioned and justified homophobia,” Senator Loretta Weinberg, a Teaneck Democrat and a sponsor of the marriage bill, said during debate on the measure. “The marriage of two committed and consenting people in love, whether they’re gay or straight, should make absolutely no difference to anyone else in the world.”

Sen. Gerald Cardinale, a Cresskill Republican, said the bill seeks to change “thousands of years of human history.”

“The very definition of the term is that it involves at least one male and at least one female,” Cardinale said of marriage. “This bill opens a Pandora’s box. The unintended consequences may be more than we can imagine.”

Two years ago, a gay-marriage bill was defeated 20-14 in the Senate with three abstaining, including Sweeney, a West Deptford Democrat who later said he made a mistake in not voting. It needed 21 votes for approval.

Two Republican lawmakers, Diane Allen and Jennifer Beck, voted for the bill today, while two Democratic senators, Ronald Rice and Jeff Van Drew, voted against it.

“I respect the opinions and views of all my colleagues, but it is my opinion that our republic was established to guarantee liberty to all our people,” Beck said during debate. “It’s our role as elected representatives to protect all of the people who live in our state.”

Democrats control the Senate, 24-16, and the Assembly, 48-32, and would need a two-thirds majority, or 27 members in the Senate and 54 in the Assembly, to override vetoes.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a group that has fought to make gay marriage legal, said passage is a victory, even with a promised veto. Supporters now have the entire two-year legislative session to win the three votes needed to override a veto, Goldstein said.

“An override now becomes a very real possibility,” Goldstein said in an interview after the vote.